by Trina M. Lee
One thing I hadn’t noticed before the turn was the many flavors of blood. I could easily pick out specific things like age, health, and toxins. None of these things would harm me, but it definitely affected the experience. A rich-blooded, healthy young thing was the cream of the crop.
Perhaps best of all was the heady energy that filled the building. Between the vampires present and the lusty humans looking for a power trip, it was like bathing in a sea of bliss. The freely exuded energy caressed me like a gentle summer breeze, and I knew I could take it all in should I want or need to.
Heads turned as I made my way through the swarm. Not a vampire in the place failed to react. From obvious gaping to concealed glances, they all took the opportunity to look me over. One of them was even bold, or stupid, enough to metaphysically reach out to touch me, much like Shya had.
I pinned this vampire with a fierce stare and slowly shook my head. He wouldn’t get another warning. For too long they’d had run of this city. Now it was mine. They could co-exist peacefully, or they could die.
The bar drew me because it was often my first stop. It was where I’d find Willow and toss back a few whiskeys. I gazed mournfully at the whiskey bottles perched on the shelf behind Josh, the often-grumpy human bartender.
“It’s about time you turned up,” Josh greeted me with a frown. His lack of reaction wasn’t surprising. He was rarely impressed by anything he saw here. “This guy has been in here every night for almost a week asking for you. Now you can deal with him.”
He jerked a thumb toward a man seated at the far end of the bar, nursing a beer. The guy was middle aged, average build, a trace of grey at his temples and a few fine lines around his eyes and mouth. He wore a partial frown that appeared to be part of his natural resting face, making him look perpetually unhappy. The cell phone in his hand appeared to have his attention, but the tight set of his shoulders indicated that he was more aware of what went on around him than it seemed.
“Get me a whiskey,” I said, receiving a questioning stare from Josh who shrugged and poured me the drink. I just wanted to smell it.
I lingered where I was, whiskey in hand. Studying the man, I tried to guess what it was he wanted. It wasn’t often that humans came in here asking for me. Pretty much never actually.
Raising the glass, I gave a sniff at the contents. The strong aroma brought forth a surge of memories, many of which I hadn’t realized I’d associated with the drink. Following the brief nostalgia was a gut-turning sensation low in my stomach. The sudden urge to toss the noxious liquid was strong. Bummer.
I left the glass sitting on the bar and made my way over to the stranger. Placing a hand on the shoulder of the man seated next to him, I pushed a little power forth and said, “Take a walk.”
The man blinked a few times before getting up and vacating his bar stool. I slid onto it, and the stranger turned to look at me. He did a double take, and his dark eyes widened.
“You’ve been looking for me,” I said. It wasn’t a question. Suspicious, I felt him out, finding that he possessed no supernatural power.
“If you’re Alexa O’Brien, then yes, I have.” He was unafraid, something I found interesting considering he was face to face with me as a vampire inside my own vampire club.
“The one and only. So, what do you want?” Might as well cut to the chase. I’d learned that small talk was useless in these situations. Beating around the bush was for cowards and idlers.
He sucked in a deep breath, exhaling slowly. Then he stuck out a hand. “My name is Brinley Kane. I’m a youth worker, and I need your help.”
I accepted his hand, careful not to hold it too long, wary of unintentionally enthralling him. “And what exactly do you think it is that I can do for you, Mr. Kane?”
“Please, call me Brinley.” He stared at his hand for a second before trying to inconspicuously rub it on his pants. “I work with at-risk youth in the city. Kids that have no one and nothing. Most of them live on the streets. Naturally, they get desperate and do things nobody should have to do to survive. It makes them victims. I need your help making it stop.”
That was an awful lot to take in, and he’d barely scratched the surface. I stared into Brinley’s deep-brown eyes, finding a gentleness that contrasted greatly with his hardened appearance. He looked like your average guy, but there was a deep-rooted pain coming off him that told me he’d seen horrible things.
My first reaction was to tell him to leave, that I couldn’t help anyone seeing as I couldn’t even help myself. But Willow’s words rang in my ears, echoed by Veryl’s: Protector of Mankind.
“Tell me more.”
I listened attentively as he told me about the kids he so clearly adored: Girls as young as twelve were prostituting on the street in order to eat another day or merely just to get a fix of the junk some dirtbag pimp had hooked them on. Teen moms faced having their children taken away simply because the system had failed them. Kids with petty theft charges were treated like murderers without rights.
As he spoke I felt my heart break many times over. I’d thought my initiation into adulthood had been harsh, but it was a cakewalk compared to what I was hearing.
“Just this morning I picked a girl up from her pimp’s house. She was starving and bruised. Typical really. A lot of these kids are in the system, but it fails them time and time again. They’re nothing but a case number to those who don’t have to look into their battered faces.”
Brinley paused to take a sip of beer. It was evident that he needed a moment to gather himself, and I patiently waited. Kale approached with a raised brow. I gave a slight shake of my head, and he, understanding, drifted away into the crowd.
“Adult men pimping and buying twelve-year-old girls,” he finally said, his voice thick with emotion. “And nobody will do a goddamn thing about it. It makes me sick.”
It made me sick too. Something stirred deep in my heart. How could I turn him away, knowing it would be the same as turning a blind eye to the world’s hurts?
“What do you need me to do?” I asked, knowing as the words came out of my mouth that I’d do anything he asked.
The empathy he so clearly had for these kids touched me in a place where the light dwelled. I knew then that Willow was right. It wasn’t over for me. Being a vampire didn’t mean I was without choice. I still had a purpose. Maybe, just maybe, this was part of it.
I wasn’t fool enough to believe this was a shot at redemption. There was no taking back what I’d done just before coming here. There was no making it right. But perhaps I could still find a light in this darkness.
Relief brought the first hint of a wan smile to his face. “You’ll help? I knew I was taking a shot in the dark here. I wasn’t sure you would help. I mean, he said you would, the guy who gave me your name. But nobody ever really wants to.”
I froze. “What guy gave you my name?”
“This guy I met while waiting for one of the kids to meet me for coffee. It was a few weeks ago. He didn’t give me a name. Tall, sandy hair. Green eyes with bits of gold. I remember because I’d never seen anything quite like it. You know him?”
Willow. Brinley saw Willow before everything went down with Shya, before I turned and he fell forever into darkness.
Tears sprang up in my eyes, and I turned away so Brinley wouldn’t see the blood spill down my face. I grabbed a napkin from a nearby dispenser and did my best to stop their fall.
“Yeah, I know him. He’s a good friend of mine.” Willow had sent him to me. That meant I had to help him.
Willow’s beautiful gold-flecked green eyes surfaced in my memory, followed by the memory of seeing them turn demon red. The gold had remained though. My heart ached.
“Look,” Brinley said, his voice gentle, as if he often spoke to those in tears. “I know you’re not human. You don’t have to fake it for me. This place kind of gave it away, but I don’t care about that. I’m used to having to trust my instincts, and I feel like I can trust you.”
&nbs
p; “You’re right. I’m not human.” I turned back to him, letting him see the blood tears gleaming in my eyes. “I want to help you, but please, don’t make the mistake of trusting me just yet. I’m still relearning how to trust myself.”
Brinley nodded, but he seemed unfazed by what he saw. There was something haunted in him. Humans were the worst kind of monster. I knew it on a surface level, but he seemed to know the true depths of what they were capable of.
“Whatever you are, there’s no way in hell it’s worse than the scum harming these kids,” he insisted. “They need help, and my hands are tied up in legalities. There’s nothing else I can do.”
I studied Brinley, finding something fascinating in his energy. It ran strong with determination despite being fragmented with the strain of emotional baggage. He loved the kids he spoke of. I could feel it emanating from him like the warm glow of a campfire. That spark could not be extinguished. It was inspiring.
“Brinley, you must understand that if you ask me to get involved, someone is going to die.” A thrill of excitement shot through me. It had been quite some time since I was approached to take out the trash. I didn’t count the hit job I’d done for the Doghead Alpha recently. That had been a job of necessity, not want.
There was no hesitation in Brinley. He merely nodded, accepting it. “Whatever it takes to keep these kids safe. I just wish there was something I could give you in return for your help.”
“Oh, I’ll be getting something out of it. Don’t worry about that.” Would I ever. Just the thought of hunting and killing a creep who defiled children got me excited. Some vampires preferred to kill at random, grabbing whoever caught their interest. It had always been in my nature to enjoy the hunt of one who deserved it.
“So there’s this girl.” Brinley scrolled through some photos on his phone before handing it to me. “Allie. She’s fourteen. On the streets. She usually checks in with me a few times a week, but I haven’t heard from her in almost two. I know she’s in trouble. I was hoping you could maybe check out her pimp’s place. That’s usually where she ends up. I would, but I can only get so involved before it becomes illegal. Trespassing, harassment. That kind of shit.”
A scowl marred my face as I stared at the picture. To think that the law would stop a caring human being from coming to the aid of a young girl was both sickening and scary.
Allie was young, but her dark eyes were like bottomless pits of despair. They made her appear much older than her age. Dark hair and light brown skin, she was lovely, other than the utter loathing in her expression.
“Get me an address. I’ll see what I can do. I can’t make any promises though.”
Brinley almost collapsed in his relief. Even as he slid off his stool, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed. “Thank you. Truly, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” It felt right to help him, but still I harbored some worry. What if I couldn’t? What if I only made things worse somehow?
Protector of Mankind.
It didn’t matter. I had to try.
I stayed at The Wicked Kiss until the threat of sunrise drove me out, along with everyone else. Nobody had tried to mess with me though there were a lot of hard to read stares and not so covert glances. I was a little disappointed.
Getting into the Camaro thrust me back into the awkward and heartrending chaos that was my relationship with Kale. I spent the drive back to his house telling him about Brinley and his kids. It was a good way to distract ourselves from the real issue for a while.
“You should take Falon with you,” Kale said, stunning me.
“Why would I ever do that?” I studied him from behind a curtain of ash blonde. Was this his way of saying he didn’t plan to stick around?
Kale glanced over at me, his expression guarded. “You should have someone there to keep you from losing control and attacking the wrong person. Like the girl. I can’t overpower you anymore. Well, not for long anyway. But Falon can.”
“Yeah that’s what Falon needs,” I scoffed, “an excuse to use force on me.”
Kale didn’t respond. His hand was tight on the wheel, making his knuckles bulge. Something was definitely bothering him. And I knew what it was, for that same voice lingered inside my head.
The rest of the drive was spent in tense silence. A few times one of us attempted idle chatter only to have it die out. We pulled up to Kale’s house, and immediately I wanted to be almost anywhere else in the world. Not because I didn’t want to be with him but because I knew it was coming to an end and I wasn’t ready to face that.
Since we’d left the house and returned, it felt as if everything had changed. We’d awoken at sundown in each other’s arms, and now we returned at sunrise with a wedge driven between us.
We entered the house, closing out the approaching dawn. I stared around Kale’s home, finding that it didn’t truly have a loved, lived-in feel to it. He had no roots here, nothing to keep him tied to the city. Only me.
I wanted to go back to the previous day, when we’d made love with wild surrender, when the world outside the door had momentarily ceased to exist. Except that it did exist, and here we were, thrust back into it.
We stood awkwardly in the living room, looking at everything but each other. Finally Kale said what we were both thinking. “We can’t keep doing this, Alexa. We crossed a line in the last twenty-four hours. Several lines actually. We’ve taken things too far.”
It hurt to hear him say it. But he wasn’t wrong. I’d gone off the rails since the turn, embracing the madness that came from a deadly combination of bloodlust and separation from Arys. Running straight into the arms of the man who shared my weaknesses had been a mistake, a beautiful, mind-blowing, spirit-shattering mistake.
“You let him get inside your head, didn’t you?” I asked, dragging my tortured gaze to Kale’s defeated one. “He has a way of doing that.”
I spoke of Arys with detachment, loathe to utter his name. It infuriated me that he’d gotten to Kale. If there was one person I wanted Arys to have no part of, it was Kale. He was mine.
Except he isn’t.
“He doesn’t want to watch you lose your mind. Neither do I.” Turning away, Kale slid his jacket off and draped it over the back of the couch. He seemed to be having trouble maintaining eye contact. “I knew that, if we took it this far, it would be damn near impossible to go back to what we were before, and I did it anyway. Because I can’t fucking resist you. But it’s bad, my love. So bad.”
I mulled over the many thoughts that fought to be the first out of my mouth. All of the ways I wanted to respond felt wrong.
“I know,” I said, sitting heavily on the couch. “It’s bad. But it’s been bad for a while now, Kale. We were never going to be what we once were. It’s too late for that. I know what you’re going to say, but please, don’t leave just because Arys told you to. Don’t let him make choices for you.”
Kale fisted a handful of his short, brown hair and swore. “He offered me a place with Jenner, acting as your second in Vegas.”
“What?” My jaw dropped, and my fists clenched with the sudden need to hit someone.
I hadn’t heard that part of their conversation, having already fled the scene. Arys was so out of line. This time he’d really done it. The onslaught of anger took me from simmering to boiling over.
Unable to contain it, an explosion of red-hot emotion poured from me. Rather than flow into the surrounding environment, it traveled that direct link to Arys and hit him like a speeding bullet.
I felt the impact, felt him take the hit, and found grim satisfaction in the pain it caused. For a moment the mental door between us was open, and I braced for either a retaliation or an explanation. I received neither.
Arys merely took the assault, knowing what brought on such a vicious outburst. I could feel him inside his small house, secluded from the sun. In that brief moment inside his head, I caught a glimpse of the hell he’d been going through. I remembered that I didn’t suffer alone. The s
eparation was breaking him down too.
I could feel him waiting, but for what I didn’t know. Another attack. A mental tirade. Arys was so calm and willing to take whatever I threw at him. Unable to deal with that reaction from him, I slammed the door between us, shutting him out once again.
My hands shook, and white noise rushed in my ears. The lights flickered. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on containing the excessive force threatening to tear apart my insides. The frat house had been too much too soon.
“Alexa, look at me.” Kale sank to his knees on the carpet in front of me and took my quaking hands in his. “Ground the energy. Come on, you know how to do this. Probably better than I do. Just let it go.”
The power arced from me to Kale, seeking to draw him in as well. Unable to resist my thrall, I felt him begin to fall under my spell. With a frustrated growl, I sought out the earth, letting my wolf’s link to it guide me.
With great effort I aligned my energy with that of the earth. Then with everything I had, I pushed the excess force into the earth. It accepted my offering, bringing me back to a state of balance. I opened my eyes to find Kale staring at me with something like relief and sorrow.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “You don’t deserve the hell I’ve put you through. If you want to take off, I don’t blame you for that. But don’t feel like you have to go to Vegas. Don’t let anyone make that choice for you.”
Kale sighed and lightly bumped my chin with a finger. “I haven’t been fair to you. Punishing you for saving me was selfish and cowardly. I acted out because I couldn’t stand that we couldn’t be together. But I understand why now. We bring out the worst in each other. So maybe it’s better that I go, for a while. I’ll be your eyes and ears in Las Vegas. I will still be part of you, just at a safe distance.”
“I can’t believe you’re even considering this.” I leaned in to press my face to his in a wolfish nuzzle. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.” His soft chuckle both warmed and crushed my heart. “I think it might actually be good for me. And I know it will be good for you.”